Free Republic

WASHINGTON (Map, News) - Barack Obama's foreign policy advisers said Tuesday that Osama bin Laden, if captured, should be allowed to appeal his case to U.S. civilian courts, a privilege opposed by John McCain. Responding to questions from The Examiner, Sen. John Kerry and former White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke said bin Laden would benefit from last week's Supreme Court decision giving terrorism suspects habeas corpus, the right to appeal their military detention to civilian courts. “If he were to be brought back,” Clarke said of bin Laden, “the Supreme Court ruling holds on the right of habeas corpus.”...

According to American media reports (and what could be more reliable?) the hottest gift items for pre-school children in this year's Christmas buying season are: cellphones, laptops, digital cameras, and MP3 players. A New York Times item directs us to the “hottest toys list” at Amazon.com, and such products as the Easy Link Internet Launch Pad from Fisher-Price; and an exercise bike for toddlers, connected to a video game. The theme of, “get the kid staring at a screen,” runs right through the chart, and since the screens are interactive, let me take this opportunity to warn medical professionals to...

Apathy U by: Emily Mullin, November 27, 2007 “Do you want to know who you are? Don't ask. Act! Action will delineate and define you.” The quote was said by one of our most famous founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson. And although it was spoken over 200 years ago, the message is still applicable today. The world has changed slightly since the time of Thomas Jefferson, and so has the youth of America. Young people now live in a sort of bubble, a controlled environment called college. We permeate our brains with information five days a week and our livers with...

Another Theory of Relativity by: Malcolm A. Kline, November 06, 2007 Relativists, beware. The professors who tell you that “Everything is relative” probably fail to relate how destructive an idea that is. In an interview with Hillsdale College’s Imprimis magazine, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas noted “the connection between relativism, nihilism, and Naziism.” “The common idea that you can do whatever you want to do, because truth and morality are relative, leads to the idea that if you are powerful enough, you can kill people because of their race or faith,” Justice Thomas explains. “So ask your relativist friends sometime:...

It has now been twenty years since the late Allan Bloom published The Closing of the American Mind, his bestselling broadside against the ideas and conceptions that animate the contemporary university. The general theme of Bloom’s book is encapsulated in the subtitle: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. . . .The Closing of the American Mind has been interpreted as one of those influential salvos in the cultural wars of recent decades between reformers and traditionalists on the campus and between conservatives and liberals in the society at large. . . . Bloom...

Science Fiction has a lousy record of predicting the future. In the 1930s, for example, it was widely held that by 1970, toga-clad descendants of the Depression Generation would be living in giant art deco cities full of speeding Dymaxion Cars and dining on food pills. In the '50s and '60s, it was rocket belts and atomic-powered flying cars we were supposed to be enjoying by 2000. And today? In almost every extrapolation of the future I've read lately, the ultimate fate of mankind is uploading -- the transference of consciousness from biological to digital substrates. Such uploads, it is...

Contemporary Western society is tumbling further and further into the abyss of undifferentiated mediocrity. Much of the blame is due to the ideology of Diversity, which exploits a nihilistic, anti-rational strain in our culture. The world is now divided into two zones: the zone of culture, and the zone of Diversity. In the former, which still covers most of the planet, there is true culture, organic and deeply rooted. It is also exclusive, to a greater or lesser extent. Even where the territory is shared, one is cognizant of the fact that the cultural space is divided into two or...

Brain-Damaged Man "Awakened" After Six Years of Semi-Consciousness By Elizabeth O'Brien NEW YORK, August 2, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - A severely brain-damaged man who was in a minimally conscious state for six years has recently regained new levels of awareness and physical capabilities after receiving electrical brain implants. The unnamed 38-year old man had his head repeatedly kicked during a mugging in 1999 and was left unable to talk or move properly. In addition, he was kept alive on a feeding tube.In a study led by Dr. Nicholas Schiff of Weill Cornell Medical College of Cornell University in New York, researchers...

Let's roll this juggernaut back FROM THE LEFT - CHRIS TROTTER - The Dominion Post | Friday, 6 July 2007 It was one of the many extraordinary acts of heroism which ennobled the dreadful slaughter of 9/11: the storming of the cockpit of United Airlines Flight 93. Realising that their Boeing 757 airliner was about to be used as a massive cruise missile against either the White House or the United States Capitol building, some of the passengers decided to try to overpower the terrorists who had hijacked their flight. One of those passengers, Todd Beamer, communicated the details of...

Books: Notable anti-religion and anti-Christian books of the past year—particularly Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great—make something out of, well, nothing. Nineteenth-century novelist Gustave Flaubert used to joke about archaeologists discovering a stone tablet signed "God" and reading, "I do not exist." His punch line had an atheist then exclaiming, "See! I told you so!" These days, nothing stops atheistic caissons from rolling along the bookstore aisles. Maybe that's because atheists on average have small families and lots of discretionary doubloons jingling in their pockets. Sam Harris' Letter to a Christian Nation (Knopf), Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell (Penguin), and...

PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, June 1, 2007 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Philadelphia City Council voted yesterday to end a nearly 80-year-old lease held by the Boy Scouts local branch over the group's adherence to a national policy banning actively homosexual leaders. The ongoing dispute pitted the Scouts' Cradle of Liberty Council against homosexual activists over the organization's refusal to adopt an official policy welcoming homosexuals into leadership. The City, under pressure by activist groups, wants the Scouts to either alter the organization's policy or start paying market rent for the use of the historical Beaux Arts building, where the Scout headquarters has been...

What do Karl Marx, Leon Trotsky, Noam Chomsky and George Soros have in common? They were/are all radicals, born to Jewish parents, had no Jewish identity and hurt Jews (not to mention non-Jews). The term "non-Jewish Jew" is generally attributed to the Jewish historian Isaac Deutscher, who wrote an essay by that name in 1954. The term describes the individual who, though born a Jew (Judaism consists of a national/peoplehood identity, not only a religious one), identifies solely as a citizen of the world and not as a Jew, either nationally or religiously. Once the walls of Jewish ghettos broke...

This essay asks two questions: Are Europeans in the throes of passive cultural and political suicide as they ignore the threat of fanatical Muslims in their communities? And if so, have the leaders of the Democratic Party in America joined the Europeans in sleepwalking towards a precipice? My main source for answering the first question is a book review titled Suicide of the West, by Theodore Dalrymple which appeared in the Clairmont Review of Books, Fall 2006. Dalrymple reviewed three books in pursuit of his theme of the "Suicide of the West" — namely, Why the Continent's Crisis is America's...

CHICAGO (Reuters) - A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics. "Religion is fragmenting the human community," said Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction list on October 15. There is a "huge visibility and political empowerment of religion. President George W. Bush uses his first veto to deny funding for stem cell research and scientists everywhere are horrified," he said in an interview. Religious polarization...

A fresh wave of atheistic books has hit the market this autumn, some climbing onto best-seller lists in what proponents see as a backlash against the way religion is entwined in politics. "Religion is fragmenting the human community," said Sam Harris, author of "Letter to a Christian Nation," No. 11 on the New York Times nonfiction list on October 15. There is a "huge visibility and political empowerment of religion. President George W. Bush uses his first veto to deny funding for stem cell research and scientists everywhere are horrified," he said in an interview. Religious polarization is part of...

--Snip--The removal of Robert Smith is thus an early-warning sign. Unless things change in ways now quite unforeseeable, it will not be very long before the principle of traditional Western morality that homosexual conduct is immoral will be contrary to the public policy of the United States. As this new public policy takes hold, it will filter through the law and society just as other anti-discrimination norms have. Adherence to the new policy will be a de facto requirement for holding public office, and, as private entities adopt the policy as they have other anti-discrimination norms, people adhering to the...

Call for help: High-risk teenagers, mostly new immigrants, use swastikas, racial slurs to convey their emotions; draw pictures of wounded ultra-Orthodox man saying ‘Hail Hitler’ and another calling for 'death to Jews.' Educators: Using Nazi symbols became most effective way of protest for them The repeated cases of swastikas spray-painted in synagogues and in public places, which naturally caused a storm all around Israel, do not surprise education experts who work with new immigrant high-risk teens. Nazi symbols and anti-Semite slurs have become the main and most effective means of protest against the injustice they feel they are subject to...

Address to: Summer Sounds Symposium Punga Cove, New Zealand February 11 2006 For the past three decades and more, many of the leading opinion makers in our universities, the media and the arts have regarded Western culture as, at best, something to be ashamed of, or at worst, something to be opposed. Before the 1960s, if Western intellectuals reflected on the long-term achievements of their culture, they explained it in terms of its own evolution: the inheritance of ancient Greece, Rome and Christianity, tempered by the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the scientific and industrial revolutions. Even a radical...

WASHINGTON - Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, who took a leading role in the Terry Schiavo case, said Sunday it taught him that Americans do not want the government involved in such end-of-life decisions. Frist, considered a presidential hopeful for 2008, defended his call for further examinations of the brain-damaged Florida woman during the last days of a bitter family feud over her treatment. Schiavo was in a persistent vegetative state. The case became a rallying point for right-to-life advocates, an important segment of the Republican Party. It also drew interest from those supporting the right to refuse life-sustaining medical...

OTTAWA - Group sex among consenting adults is neither prostitution nor a threat to society, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled on Wednesday as it lifted a ban on so-called “swingers” clubs. In a ruling that radically changes the way courts determine what poses a threat to the population, the top court threw out the conviction of a Montreal man who ran a club where members could have group sex in a private room behind locked doors.

Trio of Oregon cases before high courtTaking arguments to the U.S. Supreme Court carries high pricePETER WONGStatesman JournalNovember 25, 2005Oregon will have the rare distinction of having the U.S. Supreme Court hear three cases originating in the state within a year.------snip----------More than a month ago, in a case that has drawn wide attention, five lawyers from the state Department of Justice defended Oregon's assisted-suicide law against a challenge from the federal Department of Justice.------snip----------On Dec. 7, lawyers will argue for the state in a death-penalty case.------snip----------In the spring, lawyers will argue about the rights of foreigners in criminal cases that...

Buying eggs is OK, Lying is not. Woo-Suk Hwang, the South Korean stem cell pioneer resigned yesterday as head of the World Stem Cell Hub collaboration. The reason for his resignation is that Hwang's lab used eggs donated by two of his junior research scientists. In addition, Hwang discovered that other eggs used in the research were not donated, but had been purchased by another collaborator. In 2004, Hwang achieved the breakthrough of creating the first cloned human embryos and deriving stem cells from them. This advance is a step toward the day when researchers can create transplantable cells and...

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) -- For more than 30 years, public television station KOCE has dedicated coverage to Orange County in a media market otherwise dominated by the news and glitz of nearby Los Angeles. But the small station is now battling in court to prevent Daystar, one of the nation's largest Christian networks, from taking over its airwaves. The conflict began in 2003, when the Coast Community College District decided to sell KOCE-TV to the KOCE Foundation, the station's fundraising arm, over competing bidder Daystar. Daystar Television Network sued, claiming its bid should have been selected because the sale...

WASHINGTON, Nov. 21 /U.S. Newswire/ -- Following is a statement of support for the DREAM Act from FIRM (Fair Immigration Reform Movement) -- the Most Diverse Nationwide Grassroots Immigrant Rights Coalition: In a strong show of bipartisan cooperation, Sens. Hagel (R-Neb.), Durbin (D-Ill.) and Lugar (R-Ind.) joined five Republicans and six Democrats to introduce the Development, Relief for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, right before the start of the holiday season, traditionally a time for family and reflection. The DREAM Act permits undocumented high school graduates who immigrated to the U. S. as minors and who have lived in the U.S....

President Putin awards the primate of the canonical Ukrainian Orthodox Church Kiev, November 23, Interfax - Russian Ambassador to Ukraine Victor Chernomyrdin presented Metropolitan Vladimir of Kiev and All Ukraine with the Order of Honour in recognition of his services in the development of religious and cultural traditions and consolidation of Russia-Ukrainian relations. As the press service of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church has reported on Wednesday, Chernomyrdin noted in his speech the outstanding role that Metropolitan Vladimir played in the spiritual revival of the Ukrainian and Russian peoples and consolidation of friendship and cooperation between the two fraternal nations. Russian...

OAK RIDGE - All 1,800 copies of the Oak Ridge High School student newspaper have been confiscated by school officials and won't be distributed to students, Superintendent Tom Bailey said Wednesday. An article explaining birth-control methods and a two-page feature about tattoos and body piercing, complete with photos of students displaying their body art and piercing, prompted the move, Bailey said. School officials made the decision late Tuesday to yank the latest issue of "The Oak Leaf'' from circulation at the recommendation of Principal Becky Ervin, Bailey said. "The action of the principal was totally appropriate,'' Bailey said. "I would...

Two separate reports, one from my Dad and one from a friend... both at Tacoma Mall. Not being allowed inside, due to "someone inside with a semiautomatic shooting in the mall". Large number of police on the scene, sealing the exits. Not letting anyone in or out. Will post a source as soon as I have one.

BRITISH historian David Irving now acknowledges Nazi gas chambers existed, and admits some of his past statements could be interpreted as denying people were gassed. On the day before Irving faces a court hearing, his lawyer Elmar Kresbach said the historian had "changed some of the views he is so famous for". "He told me: 'Look, there was a certain period when I drew conclusions from individual sources which are maybe provocative or could be misinterpreted or could be even wrong'," Mr Kresbach said. Prosecutors this week charged Irving, 67, with denying the Holocaust, which is a crime under Austrian...

BOSTON - Massachusetts' attorney general is launching an investigation into several supermarkets that stayed open opened on Thanksgiving in defiance of the state's Puritan-era Blue Laws. The laws were passed in the 1600s to keep colonists at home or in church on Sundays. Parts of the laws, such as the ban on Sunday liquor sales, have been repealed, but a prohibition on most stores doing business on Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, has not. "If these stores want to open, there's a way to do it: Change the law," David Guano, a spokesman for Attorney General Thomas F. Reilly,...

Pastor Åke Green July 20, 2003 - Borgholm, Sweden *Translator’s notes: This is a translation into contemporary American English of the Swedish sermon transcript. Corresponding Bible quotations are taken from the NIV (New International Version). The accuracy of the Bible quotes in Swedish are not verified against a Swedish Bible, but they all compare well to the NIV. Implied or omitted words and translation comments are in [brackets].Translation team: Anders Falk, of Falk Productions, Culver City, CA Debra Sandstrom, freelancer, Coeur d’Alene, ID EDITOR'S NOTE: The Swedish Bible of 1917 which Pastor Green used in his sermon best matches...

'Inclusive' name change needles N.S. tree growerCBC News November 23, 2005 A spruce tree grower in Nova Scotia isn't happy his 16-metre Christmas tree has become a "holiday" tree in Massachusetts. Every fall, the province sends a tree to Boston as a thank-you gift for the help the New England city gave Halifax after the devastating 1917 ship explosion that levelled parts of Nova Scotia's capital. Officials with Boston's parks department decided it would be less offensive to some people and generally more inclusive if the word "Christmas" was dropped when they referred to the tree. "A lot of people...

NEW YORK (AP) -- A gay man charged with helping his lover loot a wealthy school district has asked a judge to rule that state law protecting spouses from having to testify against each other also applies to same-sex partners. Stephen Signorelli, fighting charges that he stole at least $219,000 from the Roslyn, New York, school district, is seeking to bar testimony by his longtime companion, Frank Tassone, the district's former superintendent. Auditors say that in all, $11.2 million was taken from the Long Island district, and state Comptroller Alan Hevesi has called the case "the largest, most remarkable, most...

ABU DHABI — Senior officials have condemned the queer acts practised by 26 youth at a gay party held in a hotel in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday night. A group of 26 men, many of whom were dressed in female outfits and the rest in Arab attire, were arrested by the police on Wednesday following a tip-off that such a party was being held. Speaking to Khaleej Times, experts, educationists and men of law have called on parents to play their role and give importance to the role of schools and national associations in inculcating the teachings of Islam and...

Following a recent interview for yet another documentary on pornography, I thought of so many things I should have said about pornography. I had discussed its role as producing impotence, robbing men of their manhood. I had addressed its psychopharmacology as an "erototoxin." I had documented its presence in adultery, divorce, rape, child sex abuse and incest. Civility, humanity, I said, has always hung by the thinnest of threads. We allow ourselves to be coarsened at the greatest risk. Life in the last five decades should have proven to us all – or at least to any hominoid with a...

How's this for a clever rhyme? "Jews are here, Jews are there | Jews are almost everywhere | filling up the darkest places | evil looks upon their faces." Originally published as a column in The Times of London. I've always distrusted both a) cretins who believe in the inherent goodness of children, and b) people who write poems. So imagine my delight when I read in the singularly excellent newsletter of the Middle East commentator Tom Gross about a piece of verse published in the new collection "Great Minds," a collection of poems by 11- to 18-year-olds, which is...

BRUNSWICK, Maine --Firefighters will be allowed to erect a memorial that features a poem with a reference to God and language that some town councilors viewed as sexist. The poem, "A Fireman's Prayer," was written in 1959 by Kansas firefighter A.W. Linn and is found on memorials across the country.

The scholar who exposed fraud and exploitation in the work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is blowing the whistle on the E! cable channel's new "reality" show about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends. Judith Reisman, author of "Kinsey: Crime and Consequences" and a soon-to-be-released new title, "Kinsey's Attic: How One Man's Pathology Changed the World," says "Girls Next Door" is Hollywood's latest and boldest attempt to normalize pornography in our culture. The author, who served as a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department on obscenity issues, is angry the network is investing so much time in...

Now that the hints about joining a convent don't seem to be gaining any traction (seemed like a perfectly logical alternative to me) we are confronting the issue of a teenage girl going out with boys. In case you haven't been following the news, it is a scary prospect. Oh, right, you say, like there hasn't always been some drinking and sex in high school. And that's true. What I don't remember is having an ambulance gurney show up at a high school dance to wheel out a student suffering from alcohol poisoning, as happened recently at Albany High School....

Disputed Questions. A Catholic Philosopher Argues for RelativismIt's Dario Antiseri. He explains his theses in the official magazine of the Catholic University of Milan. And he is criticizing, at bottom, Benedict XVI's positions on relativism, nihilism, and the natural law by Sandro Magister ROMA, November 3, 2005 – After the first few months of the new pontificate, the general impression is that no one within the Church is seriously criticizing the central theses – philosophical and theological – of Benedict XVI’s preaching. But that's not the way it is. One Catholic philosopher has disputed one of the main points of...

Traditional sexuality morality — meaning sexual restraint, particularly for women — was based on that connection between sex and conception: it evolved to protect paternity and patrimony. Now the connection has all but disappeared, as has patrimony, and the less connection, the less restraint and the more empty the morality. For this reason Christian moralists and others are doomed to failure with their quixotic hopes of getting people to say no to sex or to save themselves for married monogamy; they might as well try to put a genie back in his lamp. Because higamous, hogamous we are mostly not...

Efforts to push Western pansexual attitudes and behavior onto African Anglican provinces, is meeting with vigorous resistance and has stalled in at least two jurisdictions. Ugandan archbishop Henry Luke Orombi has vigorously opposed attempts to allow the openly American Lesbigay organization Integrity into his province, and told VirtueOnline when he was in Philadelphia recently, "While Integrity has a beach head in Uganda we have cut off Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo for organizing the group here. He has been banned from preaching and we will not let him function with us." Other African archbishops including Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola and Kenyan Archbishop...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

"Utopians are people who dream about ensuring for mankind the position of pensioner and who are convinced that this position is so splendid that no sacrifices... are too great to achieve it," he writes. But the communist fantasy can be realized only through ruthlessness, and this is always so: There is no "reason to expect that it can ever come true, except in the cruel form of despotism," he explains, adding, as somone with firsthand knowledge of communism at work, "and despotism is a desparate simulation of paradise." "Evil, I contend, is... a stubborn and unredeemable fact," he avers. Why...

PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ''Listen!'' he shouts at the beginning of ''Ecce Homo,'' and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ''For I am such and such a person. For heaven's sake do not confound me with anyone else.'' The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ''Why I Am So Wise,'' ''Why I Am So Clever,'' ''Why I Write Such Excellent Books.'' Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence...

"And yet for my husband and me, it seems that marriage simply adds a new category of potential suitors: the couple with a crush on us." -- David Valdes Greenwood ------------------------------------------------------ COUPLING Four's a Crowd Breaking up with one person is hard enough. But when it's a couple you want to avoid, it can get ugly. By David Valdes Greenwood | July 24, 2005 Once you marry, you think you are safely removed from the perils of dating. And yet for my husband and me, it seems that marriage simply adds a new category of potential suitors: the couple with...

Woody Allen (liberal) and Natan Sharansky (conservative) are celebrity Jewish intellectuals who offer radically different worldviews for your contemplation. Allen's is more popular with intellectuals worldwide. Sharansky's whole life says that Allen is wrong. Allen recently explained his view of history to the German magazine Der Spiegel. And Sharansky was interviewed by Jay Nordlinger of the National Review. If you understand their disagreement, you will grasp the main spiritual question facing Americans today. Allen, 69, is a filmmaker from Brooklyn, N.Y. Sharansky, 57, was a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag; today he is an Israeli politician. Allen got famous...

What kind of man is this? He is fastidious about his appearance, his home and his possessions. He wants as much sex as possible and chooses sexual partners mostly on the basis of appearance. He is self-absorbed and doesn´t want emotional involvement or commitment. He thinks a woman would stifle him and children would be a burden. Does this sound like gay behavior? It is also the masculine ideal purveyed by Playboy magazine to men since the 1950´s. At the End of Time, when they open the envelope labeled “What is the essence of manhood?” I suspect it will ...

Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted "'moral fact' that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole." Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that "At the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution and neither has any definable meaning other than...